Evan is suddenly coughing up bones, like, A LOT of bones, but that’s not even in the top ten strangest things that have happened to him since he moved into his new (possibly haunted) duplex . . .
May 2020, and I was spitting out little bits of tooth in the sink.
Teeth, tiny pieces of bone-colored enamel. Initially I thought it was stress, what with me being newly divorced, newly lonely, newly living out of cardboard boxes in a haunted half a duplex. I got four pieces of furniture in the divorce; the worst pieces of furniture from a great marriage that ended when my ex-husband told me, “Evan, I love you, you’re terrific, but I’m just not gay.” All because I told him at Thanksgiving that I’m a man. He sent me a holiday card, a picture of him and his new girlfriend. She’s pretty.
I didn’t send him a holiday card of me and the bloodstain that was on the dining room floor. That would have been weird. Also, I wasn’t dating the bloodstain, though I used to spend enough time with it that we might as well have been dating. Christ’s sake.
By May of 2020, I’d been on testosterone for three weeks. By then the only results were a big gain in confidence and tiny pieces of tooth in the sink. Of course, I thought spitting out bits of my teeth meant I had COVID, so, I freaked out. No matter how much I thought being under-employed and single meant that my life was the worst, I didn’t actually want to die. Not really. So, instead, I swept up the teeth bits with a paper towel and put them in a jar in the basement. Because bones go underground.
When not sweeping up bits of my teeth, or doing a rideshare, or getting high with my neighbor Katie, I was busy working on that bloodstain on the dining room floor. Or what would be a dining room if I had any furniture. Katie called herself a professional stoner and conspiracy theorist. She was the one who said the house was verified haunted. Told me she was the one who could prove it. I didn’t need proof; the bloodstain was enough. It wouldn’t come off even with the best of the worst chemicals.
I, however, didn’t sign on for a dead roommate. Which is why I was trying to get rid of the one I had. Katie was undeterred, kept showing up with more evidence.
Asked if I had found cold spots in weird places. There were, yeah. Like in the bathroom, the dining room, in the kitchen by the window. I told her that old houses were drafty and that she was weird. She stuck her tongue out at me and told me that I didn’t believe in anything. She was right.
None of what Katie said was true about ghosts. What was true was that I was obsessed with the bloodstain, and Katie was obsessed with my obsession. She stopped by on the regular asking me how the cleaning was going. Would pop over to my porch already half-baked and ask how the cleaning was going. Then she’d ask if she could come in and see how the cleaning was going. It was a routine that we’d settled on, like I settle for too much with too many weird people.
Which was probably why I told Katie about the teeth.
“Gross. See a dentist, Evan.”
“Nah,” I said, exhaling. “My dreams are getting swole like the rest of me.”
“You’re grinding your teeth in your sleep,” she said.
“Everyone grinds their teeth in their sleep.”
“Very funny. Ha ha,” she said. “You know the ghost was murdered, right? They were murdered right there in your house. Maybe with one knife or several knives, I dunno. Not a forensic scientist or a CSI devotee.”
“Were they murdered because they were a good person, or murdered because they were a bad person?”
I was fully high at this point and fully into Katie’s bullshit.
Katie shrugged and tried to look in my window. “Dunno. That’s not for me to decide. I only moved in after, cause people like you and me belong here. Verified messes and absolute weirdos.”
September 2021, and I have a new boyfriend.
The meet-cute of my current boyfriend goes like this: I found him in my backyard, climbing out of the grave I dug for him. He looked as surprised to be there as I was surprised to see him. Or maybe he was angry? Hard to tell with skeletons, since they can’t smile and their faces are frozen in a perpetual reminder that death sucks.
Brought him inside as fast as I could, because Katie is addicted to anything paranormal. The last thing I needed was her overinterest in my lack of interest in grave robbing. So, I threw my coat over Skeleton Boyfriend and rushed him inside. He’s been with me ever since. I got used to him fast, was easy. My cat, however, did not. Keep telling myself it’ll take time, as she takes time with everything.
Dating Skeleton Boyfriend might be considered weird. But on a scale of one to ten of weird boyfriends I’ve had in my life? Ten being the weirdest? He’s a solid four.
June 2020, and people thought the pandemic was over.
That’s when I met Dylan on a dating app. Also found a cat on an adoption site. Dylan and I sexted long distance for months, and the cat moved in the day I saw her picture. The cat’s name at the shelter was “Butch,” because she had one eye and an attitude problem. I also had an attitude problem, all my exes said so. So, Butch came home, and I re-named her “Meowfistopheles” or “Meowsers” or “Meow-Meow.”
Meow-Meow stuck, the others didn’t. Because Meow-Meow implies some self-respect.
Dylan didn’t move in for a while after, but his attitude was just as relatable. He was hornier than I was, hilariously funny, and more skilled with his phone than I was with stain remover. Unlike me, Dylan’s office went remote rather than just laying everyone off. He had insurance and too much time on his hands, he said. I was old hat at the delivery gig-work thing, so our lives conveniently matched: he’d be bored in a meeting and sexting me while I was trying to find a place to park on High Street to drop off a meat-lovers supreme.
Dylan was a great boyfriend: he was hot to look at, hotter to listen to, and had a way with smut. Meow-Meow was a great cat because she destroyed all four pieces of my ex-husband’s furniture and made it unrecognizable. I was also becoming unrecognizable: my neck had muscles I didn’t know I could even possess, my face had caverns and those caverns had hair growing out of them, and my hands looked like they belonged to someone else. I thought for the first time in my life that I might actually be happy.
But I wasn’t, not really. The coughing up thing was still happening. Which I didn’t tell Dylan about: new boyfriends are down to bone, but probably not down with actual real bones coming out of my throat. Also Meow-Meow, come to find, was a bona fide scaredy cat. Everything scared her: the dining room, the bathroom, the kitchen window. She spent thirty percent of her time in Halloween-posed zoomies, forty percent of her time napping, and the rest of it staring out the window at cat stuff.
Katie said the cat was stressed and needed to go outside. She said cats belonged outside, roaming free and being cats. Katie says a lot of things, only some of which make sense. But she did shut up about the dentist, and never complained about my retching cough, which I am sure she could hear through the walls.
It’s not like I was quiet about it: waking up, choking on a finger bone, or like an entire rib or something. Life, frankly, was awful. Yet the more this went on, the less hollow I felt. Kinda like I was getting a grip on being an adult. Still though, I went to a dentist, and a doctor. My teeth were fine, not a bit or any bits missing. Doctor ordered an X-Ray, and I was still full of all my original bones. A complete man, but I wasn’t happy.
That is, until July when I got a text from Dylan that said:
been thinking, baby, i can’t live another day without feeling your blow jobs for real. gimme your address, honey. i’m cumming over.
September 2021, and Meow-Meow hates her life.
Skeleton Boyfriend has his favorite places in the house. He likes to be in the kitchen by the window. He likes the bathroom mirror, trying on hats. He really likes the dining room, particularly the spot where that old bloodstain used to be. Our tastes are the same and yet different. He always wants meat for dinner, so I have to text Dylan to ask about good restaurants or recipes for that sort of thing. I keep trying to be a vegetarian, which Skeleton Boyfriend thinks is silly, since it was legit his bones I unearthed from inside of me.
Sometimes it feels like so much of what he says are things I wished I had said, or things I swallowed instead of saying. Skeleton Boyfriend is everything I wanted to be when I was femme, and everything I wished I could be in public, but don’t know if it’s allowed, or okay, or just what is even a man. But he doesn’t care. He’s a skeleton, who’s going to stop him?
Dylan knows I’m seeing someone else, doesn’t know it’s the bones we both buried. Some things some people don’t need to know. Like Skeleton Boyfriend doesn’t know I’m texting Dylan, cause Skeleton Boyfriend thinks Dylan is a piece of absolute ass that he wants to “climb like a flagpole.”
Skeleton Boyfriend may be unsettling to some people. He’s a skeleton. He legit crawled out of the grave Dylan and I dug for him. Also, his sense of humor isn’t really one after all. But he says he loves me and I really kinda need that right now. So, everything is pretty much fine. To talk to Katie, though, it’s rude that I don’t join her on the porch as much as I used to. And it’s weird that I keep the door shut all the time, and the blinds closed.
At one of our less often than usual porch meetings she said, “You’re being mean to that cat, also kind of mean to me, cause I can’t see the cat. I’m suffering, Evan, since I haven’t been able to see Meow-Meow in the window. Open the damn blinds.”
“You need to cut down on the weed, Katie.”
“Rude, Evan.” She slouched again. “And you know what else? It’s mean that you don’t let me in to see your new boyfriend. I know you have one, I can feel him moving around in there.”
“Feel him?”
“Feel him.”
Katie being weird aside, hanging out with Skeleton Boyfriend is easier than I thought it would be. I had been thinking, since Dylan had left months ago, that I was the bad guy in all my relationships. Some sort of pathological loser, so weird that I couldn’t keep my proverbial ducks in a row, which is why everyone left eventually. And why I was always so fucking alone.
Maybe it’s true: maybe I was too weird to have the living love me.
Skeleton Boyfriend, though, does love me. He tells me so, a lot. I tell him so, a lot. Maybe it’s the adage that misery loves company, or the fact that a lot of my exes have said I’m dead inside.
Meow-Meow will get used to him, eventually. She has to. Ever since Skeleton Boyfriend showed up, she’s spent her time hiding in cupboards, or angrily grooming herself on my underwear. She’ll eventually grow to like him, like I eventually did. Hopefully sooner rather than later, because Katie says the house is un-haunted now.
“That’s great,” I said, half-baked and half-asleep.
“Yeah,” she said, in a similar state. “I can say that it’s officially possessed.”
“Cool.”
September 2020, and Dylan moved in officially.
The bloodstain was disappearing from the floor and I had three jars of bones collected in the basement (plus a giant plastic crate packed with the bigger, more complete bones: bits of ribcage, spine, etc.). By September, I had nearly an entire body, minus some essential parts, which were starting to freak me out. I really, really, did not want to think about coughing up a skull.
When Dylan moved in, I had been on testosterone for nearly six months. Figured out shaving, skin was calming down, and I had my aesthetic nailed to T-shirt and jeans and looking pretty much invisible to anyone and everyone. I felt totally boss.
Dylan said I looked like a boss when he held me down on the bed.
Around the apartment, he called me his absolute hunk, his only man, his best piece of ass. I loved every second of it. And when he arrived that September from two or three states over with four days of stubble and looking like death warmed over, I fell in love with him all over again. He stepped down from the height of the U-Haul with every ounce of wired/tired and kissed me on High Street.
“I’m home,” he said.
Would’ve replied, but I couldn’t talk. He was too hot to be real.
Moved his stuff in, only the expensive shit, barely. Got interrupted by kissing, in our apartment, tripping over his computer and camera equipment and camping stuff to fall on the couch. Meow-Meow disappeared for three hours; and for fifteen minutes of that time, I gave Dylan one of those smut-fueled blow jobs. He smelled disgusting but I didn’t care. I missed him and it was our house, back then.
Two hours later, he was moving his stuff in, and I was gagging in the bathroom, and out came a heel bone. Within minutes, he was at the door, knocking politely. “Hey baby, you alright? Everything okay? You aren’t pregnant, are you? Shit.”
The heel bone went in my pocket, and I walked out, red-eyed and wiping my mouth.
“No, sweetie, not pregnant.”
“Okay good. Good, good.”
He sounded relieved but only by half. Half of a half. Ended up side-eyeing me for the rest of the day, we didn’t fuck again for another three days. I woke up coughing a couple of nights later, and the night after that, and the night after that. Coughed up the other heel bone. Then some foot bones. An entire set of wrist bones. Put them in the jars in the basement with the rest.
Had to creep around to do this, which wasn’t easy. Dylan’s arrival had left me feeling more grounded, and my gait hit heavier as I snuck around this old apartment, opening doors that cried out for WD-40, and floorboards that sounded alarms when I stepped on them. But I tried. Dylan, I had thought, was a heavy sleeper. However, heavy sleepers can still be suspicious, I guess. Because after four or five nights of this, I met him coming down the basement stairs as I was returning to bed.
“Evan, what are you doing? Everything alright?”
“Uh.”
“What’s going on? Do you need to tell me something?”
There was no way out but the truth. He tossed and turned when I coughed. Covered his head with the pillow. He’d been avoiding me me in the mornings, and then would take me to get COVID tested every two days like I had a kink for people shoving things up my nose. I was standing on the basement floor, bare feet on the silty concrete ground, hands opening and closing into fists at my sides. I had to tell him.
I had to tell him, but I couldn’t look at him when I said:
“I’ve been coughing up bones in the night. Real ones. And then I put them down here. ’Cause it seemed like the right thing to do. Bones go underground.”
Dylan’s hair was sleepy bedhead, looking like an explosion on one side. His face was also sleepy, pillow creased and droopy from dreaming. But his eyes had lit up to wide fucking awake. He crept down the rest of the stairs, peeking over my shoulder. His grin was wide, mischievous, full of up to no good as he glanced from me to the jars and back.
Then he pointed over my shoulder. “Those them?” he asked, like he’d spotted an ancient relic. His expression turned soft, and he took my cheeks in his hands. “Evan, I was so worried, but this? This is so—I don’t even know—weird that it’s cool? I just want to see the bones. I want to see what you grew.”
April 2021, and Dylan is never coming back.
Katie says I am depression on a stick and no fun anymore, so she’s been stopping by even more often since Dylan left to make sure that I am more fun and less boring. Thing is, though, I’ve been overcompensating for my lack of boyfriend with more work. Keep avoiding Katie by working longer hours, being out of the house more, and buying things I can’t afford ’cause loneliness is the best reason to make the worst mistakes.
My credit card bill was evidence of that. Meow-Meow absolutely loved this. She’d destroyed a new couch (claws), a leather jacket (pee), and frayed the cord of an overpriced TV (ate it). But I couldn’t get rid of her. I loved her too much. She was a good cat: loved to cuddle, let me trim her claws, purred every time I petted her, and gave terrific sandpaper kisses on the manscaping I’d cultivated for a solid two months.
Katie came by one evening after midnight when I staggered in sober but overworked. She stopped me before I even got to the door and took hold of my shoulders, sitting me down in the folding chair on the porch.
“You and me, we’re gonna talk,” she said.
“About what?”
“You and how you’re a total fucking wreck of a man that used to be my friend.”
“We’re still friends, Katie. I’m just tired, really way tired.”
She smiled, lit a joint, and handed it to me. “You’re a wreck, I’m a wreck, and this is why we’re friends. Oh, and I fed your cat some good vibes through the window. She’ll need some actual food, you know, when you get around to it.”
I started to fall asleep in the chair, and when I woke up, Katie was gone. Typical.
Meow-Meow was my lifeline to any decency in the world, but with Dylan gone, she’d become the worst. Sort of my fault. I loved her, but I left her alone nine, ten, then eventually twelve hours a day. Couldn’t stand the echoes of the house, the lack of weird noises and the now-missing bloodstain that I’d been obsessed with when I first moved in.
Routine had this cold familiarity: a rotation of a grind when I was that lonely. It kept me going. I knew what to do and where to go. Get up, brush teeth, shower, feed Meow-Meow, then head out to gamify gig work until I got home. Something had to give, something. And then, something eventually did.
In April, the morning after that talk with Katie, the bones I buried with Dylan came crawling out of the ground.
February 2021, and Dylan had decided to break up with me.
“Shit is too weird,” he said.
We were standing in the backyard with shovels on what should’ve been an atypically warm (but was only a frighteningly warm) series of February nights. At least it would make it easier to bury stuff. Dylan had one hand on the shovel and the other in the pocket of his jeans; he wasn’t looking at me. Instead, he stared at the garage, which was covered in condemned signs, Katie’s car was parked in it and was basically condemned too. It never moved.
“Shit is just way too weird.” Dylan turned to me then, looking me over with a full-bodied sigh. “You’re amazing, Evan. Really amazing. I love you; I do.”
When the sun came up the next morning, Dylan was gone and so was all his stuff. Like he’d never been there. Totally ghosted me. Left his keys and every trace of him behind. The last thing he said to me was, “Evan, I’m worried about you, but I can’t take care of you. You cough up bones. You clean a spot on the dining room floor like Lady Macbeth. You’re not even looking for a new job. I—can’t anymore.”
Meow-Meow was flattened for a week and a half after Dylan left, she always liked him more than she liked me. We had that in common: I liked Dylan more than I liked me, too.
September 2021, and Skeleton Boyfriend has been with me for five months.
We’ve been dating for about four months. Dylan moved in a year ago officially today, moved out less than that ago. But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about my skeleton boyfriend. He’s good. He’s a good conversationalist: like, we can talk about things that, I don’t know, we both want to talk about? We rarely argue, which is fun this early (or this late) in a relationship.
I know what he likes, which is good. He likes spicy hot chocolate and warm fuzzy blankets with fringe that he can rub on his teeth. He also likes nature documentaries, because, as he says, “Nature gives zero fucks.” His absolute favorite is audiobooks though, especially biographies, which surprised me. I also used to really like biographies.
As much as I want to not think about how Dylan moved in exactly a year ago today, I am doing a shit job of trying to forget it by sitting outside this hot wings place and going through all our old texts. The order I’m here to pick up is delayed, and my heart feels delayed, and Skeleton Boyfriend wants to make dinner tonight. I have two texts from him about what sort of meat to put in the lasagna when I get another text, which says:
happy anniversary baby, i miss you. in town for reasons. you home? i can cum over
I drop the phone when the alert goes off that the hot wings are ready. It’s a mess. The bag is dripping, I lay down a towel on the back seat and my hands are sticky so I can’t text Dylan back and I freak out. Another text comes through.
know your busy, baby. i’ll head to our place.
I had honestly thought Dylan was never coming back to town again, or that he never wanted to see me again. In a weird, co-dependent way, my mind had sort of turned Dylan into Skeleton Boyfriend. It kind of made sense. Like when you’re lonely and all you want is a boyfriend and you believe so hard that you want a boyfriend and then you start spitting out teeth and pelvises and shit and then you grow a boyfriend?
Normal shit.
Not normal at all, but facts are facts. And facts are: I loved Dylan, I still love Dylan. I loved him a lot, maybe somewhat obsessively. In fact, I am obsessing about how his visit is going to go. How he’s going to look, how he’s going to smell. If he’s going to kiss me or not. Should I try to kiss him? Yes, I’m obsessing, which is a good reason not to text an ex back but is not why I don’t. I don’t because my steering wheel is covered in buffalo sauce.
When I get home, Dylan is on my porch (our porch). He’s got a perfect five o’clock shadow and is dressed in a T-shirt that fits him so well it’s going to tattoo his abs on my memory. He sets down his duffel bag and picks me up when I climb the stairs. “You smell hot, Hot Stuff, I am going to eat you up when we get inside.”
He kisses me. The kiss is also hot, but I end up making his T-shirt look disgusting. He puts me down and I unlock the door, but won’t let Dylan in, not yet. I have something to tell him. Something I know he knows, but am pretty sure he’s not going to like.
“Uh, I live with a—” I can’t say it; I have to say it. I fail. “My boyfriend’s here.”
Dylan grins that same grin he had when he got out of the U-Haul a year ago: the one with his head cocked, eyes looking me over. He shoulders his duffel bag and puts his hand on the doorframe. He smells like buffalo sauce and his old deodorant.
“I know, Evan. You gonna let me in to meet him or what?”
I let him inside and Meow-Meow hesitates a moment before she recognizes Dylan, running to him to dolphin up to his hand and snake between his ankles. Skeleton Boyfriend stands up slowly, a rattle of bones and bobbing of his head. The house smells of lasagna and meat, so much meat. Too much meat. Meow-Meow hasn’t been this pleased in weeks, no? Months. I haven’t either. Everyone I love is right here.
“Nice to meet you,” Dylan says, extending his hand. “I’m Dylan.”
“I’m Evan,” Skeleton Boyfriend says.
Dylan grins. “Evan, nice. That’s not confusing at all.”
Skeleton Boyfriend and Dylan standing next to one another, I think they’re the perfect couple. So sweet. Absolutely wonderful. Stellar. Dylan sees it too, smiling into his sockets, raising a hand to his bony scapula. He smiles that cocky smile of his and Skeleton Boyfriend melts the same way I do.
He is, exactly, all the pieces of me I thought I buried. That I thought I’d left behind. The tender, quiet pieces. The weird ones. The ones I thought were inappropriate and wrong. The ones I thought were unpresentable and strange. The ones I’d rejected that Dylan fell in love with, then out of love with.
Skeleton Boyfriend is, in fact, me.
There’s a beat where I’m waiting for Skeleton Boyfriend to blink. Of course, he can’t. The meat sizzles and pops from the cooling stove, punctuating the moments and motions as Skeleton Boyfriend’s head turns to watch Dylan when he steps back to take my hand. He’s standing next to me so that we’re hip to hip, heat to heat. When he kisses me on the cheek, he follows with a whisper in my ear that hits all the wrong notes.
He says, “You though? You’re my Evan. Mine.”
“Evan: A Remainder” copyright © 2024 by Jordan Kurella
Art copyright © 2024 by Jess Vosseteig
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Evan: A Remainder
